Tom Engelhardt

Here are just a few of the explosive areas where Bush v. Reality is likely to play out, generating roiling crises that could chase the president through the rest of this year. Keep in mind, this just accounts for the modestly predictable, not for the element of surprise that — as with Ariel Sharon’s recent stroke — remains ever present.

Who, after all, can predict what will hit our country this year. From a natural-gas shock to Chinese financial decisions on the dollar, from oil terrorism to the next set of fierce fall hurricanes, from the bursting of the housing bubble to the arrival of the avian flu, so much is possible — but one post-9/11 truth, revealed with special vividness by Hurricane Katrina, should by now be self-evident: Whatever the top officials of this administration are capable of doing, they and their cronies in various posts throughout the federal bureaucracy are absolutely incapable of (and perhaps largely uninterested in) running a government. Let’s give this phenomenon a fitting name: FEMAtization. You could almost offer a guarantee that no major problem is likely to arise this year, domestic or foreign, that they will not be quite incapable of handling reasonably, efficiently or thoughtfully — to hell with compassionately (for anyone who still remembers that museum-piece label “compassionate conservative,” from the Bush version of the Neolithic era). So here are just four of the most expectable crisis areas of 2006 as well as three wild cards that may remain in the administration’s hand and that could chase all of us through this year — adding up, in one way or the other, to the political tsunami of 2006.

1. Iraq. Bush’s war (and occupation) of choice has shadowed him like a boogeyman from the moment that banner over his head on the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln announced “Mission Accomplished” and he declared “major combat operations” at an end on May 2, 2003. On that very day, in news hardly noticed by a soul, one of the first acts of insurgency against American troops occurred and seven GIs were wounded in a grenade attack in Fallujah. As either a prophet of the future or a master of wish-fulfillment, the president was never more accurate than when, in July 2003, he taunted the Iraqi guerrillas, saying, “Bring ‘em on.” Well, they’ve been bringing it on ever since.

Unwilling to face the realities of its trillion-dollar folly of a war and dealing with presidential polling figures entering free fall, the administration did the one thing it has been eternally successful at — it launched a fantasy offensive, not in Iraq, but here at home against the American people and especially the media. A series of aggressive speeches, news conferences, spin-doctored policy papers, and attacks on the opposition as “defeatists who refuse to see that anything is right,” all circling around an election likely to put an Islamic theocratic regime in power in Baghdad, pumped up the president’s polling numbers modestly and, more important, caused reporters and pundits to back off, wondering yet again whether we weren’t finally seeing the crack of light at the end of that tunnel. (Wasn’t the president implicitly admitting to the odd mistake in Iraq policy? Wasn’t he secretly preparing his own version of withdrawal? Weren’t the Iraqis turning some corner or other?)

It’s been a strange, brain-dead media era in which, far more than the American people, the pundits never seem to learn. Most pathetic of all, in what might have been a straightforward parody of the famed moment when a group of senior advisors from past administrations (“the Wise Men”) met with President Lyndon Johnson and urged him to reconsider his Vietnam policy, the Bush administration gathered together 13 former secretaries of state and defense (including Robert McNamara and Melvin Laird from the Vietnam era) for a photo with the president. Also offered was an Iraq dog-and-pony show involving painfully upbeat reports from chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Peter Pace and ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalizhad. In return, the 13 former officials, including Colin Powell and Madeleine Albright, got a full 5-10 minute “interchange” with the president or (as the Dreyfuss Report did the math) all of 23 seconds of consultation time per secretary. It was the Wise Men (and Woman) Photo Op and it caught something of Bushworld and its peculiar allure.

However complicated the situation in Iraq may be, here’s an uncomplicated formula for considering administration policy there in the coming year. After every “milestone,” from the killing of Saddam Hussein’s sons and the capture of Saddam himself through the “handing over” of sovereignty and various elections, things have only gotten worse. Remind me why it should be different this time? In fact, while the president warned endlessly about violence before the recent election, the violence since has been far worse with 28 Americans and hundreds of Iraqis dying in just a single tumultuous four-day period. Or put another way, whatever government may be formed in Baghdad’s Green Zone, it will preside over a Bush-installed failed state, utterly corrupt (billions of dollars have already been stolen from it) and thoroughly inept, incapable of providing its people with anything like security. In fact, just the other day, two suicide bombers, dressed in the uniforms of “senior police officers” and with the correct security passes, made it through numerous checkpoints and into the well-guarded compound of the Interior Ministry where they blew themselves and many policemen up. Iraq’s government, such as it is, has also proved incapable of delivering electricity or potable water, or of running its only industry of significance, the oil business (overseen by, of all people, Ahmed Chalabi), which is now producing less energy than in the worst moments of the Saddam Hussein/sanctions era. The country is already in a low-level civil war; its American-supported military made up of rival militias preparing to engage in various forms of ethnic cleansing; its police evidently heavily infiltrated by the insurgency; and its most important leaders are Shiite theocrats closely allied with Iran. The insurgency itself shows not the slightest sign of lessening.

Meanwhile, at home, figures as disparate as Rep. John Murtha and former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski are demanding a military disengagement by the end of 2006 and in Brzezinski’s case calling on the Democrats to come out against the war. (“Finally, Democratic leaders should stop equivocating while carping. Those who want to lead in 2008 are particularly unwilling to state clearly that ending the war soon is both desirable and feasible.”)

Iraq is a minefield for the Bush administration. Prepare for it to blow this year.

2. Trials (and Tribulations) of Every Sort. Of course some of the description of Iraq above has become increasingly applicable to the Bush administration as well. It is, after all, run by fundamentalists and presidential cultists, presiding over what increasingly looks like a FEMA-tized, failed state, riddled with corruption, and at war with itself. In 2006, Bush and his associates face a quagmire of potential scandals, exposures of corrupt and illegal practices, and trials and tribulations of all sorts. There is, as a start, special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald, still on the Plame case job.

After a brief flurry of activity in November when the National Law Journal’s 2005 “lawyer of the year” convened a new grand jury to hear further evidence, the Fitzgerald investigation dropped off just about everyone’s radar screen. Fitzgerald, however, is a dogged character, playing things very close to the vest. No one can know what exactly he will do, but he is reportedly preparing material on Karl Rove for the new grand jury. It would be reasonable to expect that, sometime in the next two or three months, he might indeed indict “Bush’s brain” and then, rather than winding down his investigation, turn from those who attempted to obstruct his view of the Plame case to the case itself. In other words, if you happen to be a betting soul, you might consider putting your money on the possibility that the Plame case investigation will reach ever higher in the administration — and Fitzgerald seems carefully shielded within the Justice Department from administration tampering.

At the same time, even though former House Majority Leader Tom (the Hammer) DeLay got hammered and officially ended his bid to regain his leadership post last week, the Texas and Washington parts of the DeLay corruption scandal are likely only to grow and spread. In Texas, DeLay’s money-laundering case was not, despite his deepest wishes, thrown out of court and is now expanding into an election spending scandal involving the National Republican Congressional Committee and linked to the Abramoff case. Lobbyist Jack Abramoff, who plied endless (mostly Republican) congressional reps with favors and perks in return for influence, pleaded guilty last week to public corruption charges and turned state’s evidence. He has claimed he possesses incriminating material on 60 congressional lawmakers (as well as many of their aides).

Last week, the Washington Post reported, federal prosecutors turned “up the pressure on a former senior aide to Rep. Tom DeLay, R-Tex., in the clearest signal yet that the sprawling public corruption investigation is now focusing on House Republican leadership offices.” Though the career prosecutors from the Justice Department’s Office of Public Integrity who turned Abramoff seem to have been reasonably insulated from administration pressure, the case threatens to hit the Republican Congress hard, just as the Plame case threatens to empty the higher realms of administration power. It looks like at least a limited number of cases will be brought against lawmakers this election year. Unlike Fitzgerald, however, the career prosecutors in the Abramoff case are overseen by a notorious Bush recess appointee, Alice Fisher. Her nomination was opposed even in a Republican-controlled Senate as she is without prosecutorial experience (though she has some experience in the subject area of Guantanamo interrogations and is tied to Tom DeLay’s defense team). So look for future fireworks, conflicts, scandals and plenty of leaks on this one.

In the meantime, the courts will be busy indeed. Just count a few of the ways: The question of whether Bush’s warrantless NSA wiretaps have polluted other terrorism cases will hit the courts this year, while the kangaroo “military” tribunals in Guantanamo have just started up again, and various cases having to do with the limits of presidential power (or the lack of them) are likely to arrive, not to speak of the four Texas gerrymandering cases (think, once again, Tom DeLay) the Supreme Court has agreed to take up before the 2006 elections that could put five now-Republican seats in the House up for grabs. (A court already tarred by the 2000 election might rule surprisingly on this one.)

3. War with the Bureaucracy. Until quite recently, with an oppositionless Congress, increasingly right-wing courts, and a cowed media, traditional constitutional checks and balances on administration claims of massive presidential powers and prerogatives have been missing in action. However, the Founding Fathers of this nation, who could not have imagined our present National Security State or the size of this imperial presidency, could have had no way of imagining the governmental bureaucracy that has grown up around these either. So how could they have dreamed that the only significant check and balance in our system since Sept. 11, 2001, has been that very bureaucracy? Parts of it have been involved in a bitter, shadowy war with the administration for years now. It’s been a take-no-prisoners affair, as Tomdispatch has recorded in the first two posts in its Fallen Legion series, focusing on the startling numbers of men and women who were honorable or steadfast enough in their governmental duties that they found themselves with little alternative but to resign in protest, quit, retire or simply be pushed off some cliff. This administration has done everything in its power to take control of the bureaucracy. As Hurricane Katrina showed with a previously impressive federal agency, FEMA, Bush and his officials have put their pals (“Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job”), often without particular qualifications other than loyalty to this president, into leading positions, while trying to curb or purge their opponents. At the CIA, for instance, just before the last election former Rep. Porter Goss, a loyal political hack, was installed to purge and cleanse what had become an agency of leakers and bring it into line. Administration officials have, in fact, conducted little short of a war against leaks and leakers. To give but a single example, the origins of the Plame case lie in part in an attempt by top officials to administer punishment to former Ambassador Joseph Wilson for revealing administration lies about an aspect of Saddam Hussein’s nonexistent weapons of mass destruction program. What those officials (as leakers, of course) did to his wife was clearly meant as a warning to others in the bureaucracy that coming forward would mean being whacked.

And yet, despite the carnage, as Frank Rich pointed out last Sunday, the New York Times reporters who finally broke the NSA story did so based not on one or two sources but on “nearly a dozen current and former officials.” Doug Ireland laid out in his blog recently how, despite fears of possible prosecution — the first thing the president did in the wake of these revelations was to denounce the “shameful act” of leaking and the Justice Department almost immediately opened an investigation into who did it — one of them, former NSA analyst Russell Tice, has gone very public with his discontent. He has already been on “Democracy Now!” and ABC’s “Nightline,” saying that “he is prepared to tell Congress all he knows about the alleged wrongdoing in these programs run by the Defense Department and the National Security Agency in the post-9/11 efforts to go after terrorists.” He claims that the NSA spied on “millions” of Americans, including, it was revealed recently, a Baltimore peace group.

The war with the bureaucracy and even, to some extent, with the military — high-level officers, for instance, clearly leaked crucial information to Rep. Murtha before his withdrawal news conference — will certainly continue this year, probably at an elevated level. The CIA has been a sieve; the NSA clearly will be; at the first sign of pressure, expect the same from career people in the Justice Department; and an unhappy military has already been passing out administration-unfriendly Iraq info left and right. Administration punitive acts only drive this process forward. Any signs of further administration weakness will do the same.

The “warriors” in the bureaucracy will, in turn, fuel further media and congressional criticism. Congress, worried about next year’s election, is an exceedingly fragile pillar of support for the president. Conservatives, as Todd Gitlin pointed out in a recent Los Angeles Times Op-Ed, are alienated or worse; certain Republican senators are angry over the way the administration is sidelining Congress. Even some right-wing judges have been acting out. And, of course, there’s the possibility that, in some chain-reaction-like fashion, the dike will simply burst and we will catch sight of something closer to the fullness of Bush administration illegality — sure to be far beyond anything we now imagine.

4. Election 2006. Count on it being down and dirty. This could be a street brawl because, with the Republican loss of even one house of Congress, the power to investigate is turned over to the Democrats as we head into a presidential election cycle.

Consider points 1-3 above: Iraq as a rolling, roiling, ongoing disaster, Republican congressional representatives and administration figures under indictment, bureaucrats leaking madly, possible seats put into play in Texas, presidential polls dropping — all having the potential to threaten an administration already filled with the biggest gamblers in our history and capable of doing almost anything if they think themselves in danger. So what can the president and his pals draw on?

Administration Wild Cards

<I<Court-packing: As Noah Feldman pointed out recently in the New York Times Magazine, the rise of the imperial presidency has a history that goes back to Thomas Jefferson’s decision to conclude the Louisiana Purchase, while the presidency’s outsize “war powers” go back at least to Abraham Lincoln. The president has long had powers unimagined by the Founding Fathers, but the Bush administration still represents a new stage in the obliteration of a checks-and-balances system of government. Last week, in an important, if somewhat overlooked, front-page piece in the Wall Street Journal (“Judge Alito’s View of the Presidency: Expansive Powers”), Jess Bravin reported on a speech Sam Alito gave to the right-wing Federalist Society in 2000 in which he subscribed to the “unitary executive theory” of the presidency (“gospel,” he called it) which puts its money on the supposedly unfettered powers of the president as commander in chief. This theory has been pushed by administration figures ranging from the vice president and his chief of staff, David Addington, to former Assistant Attorney General and torture-memo writer John Yoo. As Alito put the matter in his speech: “[The Constitution] makes the president the head of the executive branch, but it does more than that. The president has not just some executive powers, but the executive power — the whole thing.” And Yoo put it even more bluntly while debating the unitary executive theory recently. In answering the question, “If the president deems that he’s got to torture somebody, including by crushing the testicles of the person’s child, there is no law that can stop him?” he responded, “No treaty.”

Evidently, John Roberts subscribes to the same view of presidential powers (as Harriet Miers certainly did, at least when it came to George Bush). In other words, the administration is trying to pack the Supreme Court with judges who are, above all, guaranteed to come down on the side of the president in any ultimate face-off with Congress or the courts. This is surely the real significance of the Alito nomination, should it go through. In any constitutional crisis-to-come the “commander in chief” is trying to predetermine how things will fall out if his own power is at stake.

Terrorism: From Sept. 11, 2001, the terrorism/fear card has certainly been the most powerful domestic weapon in the administration’s arsenal. In the event of a major (or several smaller) terrorist strikes in this country, the Bush administration could certainly be the major beneficiary, but even that is no longer a given. History tends not to happen quite the same way twice and no one knows whether, under the shock of such an event or events, the post-9/11 moment would simply be repeated or whether Americans might feel that this administration had completely betrayed them. A terrible war, lousy government, hideous crisis management, and then, on the one thing they swore they did best — protecting the country from terror — failure. Still this is certainly an administration wild card.

Wag the Dog Strategies: In a crisis of power, there is no reason to believe that the officials who already led us into Iraq might not be willing to gamble on a Wag the Dog strategy — that is, launching an operation they had been hankering for anyway that might also turn attention elsewhere. Rumors and speculation about a massive air attack on Iran (or on “regime change” in Syria) have been kicking around since at least the spring of 2005. These have begun circulating again recently. Such a thing is certainly possible (more so, obviously, should Benjamin Netanyahu happen to win the Israeli election in March), but whether the effect of this on the administration’s fortunes would be positive for long is also unknown. It certainly seems one path to madness, not just in Iraq but also on the oil markets. (If you happen to be a devotee of oil at $100 a barrel, you might quickly get your wish.)

Is a Constitutional Crisis in the Cards?

Until 2005, it wasn’t that the Bush administration didn’t make more than its share of mistakes; thanks to 9/11, it simply had plenty of wiggle room. It could always turn attention elsewhere. It always had the fear and terror cards ready to be played. These days, turn people’s attention elsewhere and they’re likely to see yet more disaster, corruption, incompetence and illegality. In 2006, the administration has a lot less wiggle room than it used to. Polling figures reflect that vividly. When new disasters hit, whether in Iraq or New Orleans, it’s becoming harder to take American eyes off them.

Let me then offer one of those predictions — surrounded by qualifications and caveats — that all writers should be wary of. If in a bitter, dirty midterm election, filled with “irregularities,” one house of Congress or both nonetheless go to the Democrats, which I believe possible (despite their low polling figures at the moment), expect the investigations to begin. Expect as well that the Bush administration will then trot out that “obscure” presidential philosophy of power and claim that the Congress has no right to investigate the president in his guise as commander in chief.

That is why the Alito nomination is so crucial and why 2007 may prove the year of constitutional crisis in the United States.

This article originally appeared on TomDispatch.com.

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Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute’s Tomdispatch.com (“a regular antidote to the mainstream media”), is the co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of “The End of Victory Culture, a History of American Triumphalism in the Cold War.” His novel, “The Last Days of Publishing,” has just come out in paperback.

Unlike the typical president, so the reports went, he held six (count ‘em: six!) meetings with top Pentagon officials, the Joint Chiefs, the service heads and his military commanders to plan out the next decade of American war making. And he was no civilian bystander at those meetings either. On a planet where no other power has more than two aircraft carriers in service, he personally nixed a Pentagon suggestion that the country’s aircraft carrier battle groups be reduced from 11 to 10, lest China think our power-projection capabilities were weakening in Asia.

His secretary of defense, Leon Panetta, spared no words when it came to the president’s role, praising his “vision and guidance and leadership” (as would Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Martin E. Dempsey). Panetta described Obama’s involvement thusly: “[T]his has been an unprecedented process, to have the president of the United States participate in discussions involving the development of a defense strategy, and to spend time with our service chiefs and spend time with our combatant commanders to get their views.”

In other words, Obama taking ownership of the rollout of “Sustaining U.S. Global Leadership: Priorities for 21st Century Defense,” a 16-page document summarizing a review of America’s strategic interests, defense priorities and military spending. Its public unveiling was to reflect the steady hand of a commander-in-chief destined to be in charge of American security for years to come.

The president even made a “rare visit” to the Pentagon. There, he was hailed as the first occupant of the Oval Office ever to make comments, no less present a new “more realistic” strategic guidance document, from its press office. All of this, in turn, was billed as introducing “major change” into the country’s military stance, leading to (shades of former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld) a “leaner, meaner” force, slimmed down and recalibrated for economic tough times and a global “moment of transition.”

As political theater, it couldn’t have been smarter. For a president, vulnerable like all Democrats to charges of national security weakness in an election year, it was a chance for great photo ops and headlines. And it left his Republican opponents (Ron Paul, of course, excepted) in the dust, sputtering, fuming and complaining that he was “leading from behind” and “imperiling” the nation.

Even better, in an election season which has mesmerized the media, not a single reporter or pundit seemed to notice that, whatever the new Pentagon plan might mean for the U.S. military globally, it was great domestic politics for a president whose second term was in peril.

Another “Mission Accomplished” Moment?

The actual Pentagon planning document, released the day of the president’s Pentagon appearance, might as well have been written in cuneiform script or hieroglyphics. Just about any military future might have been read into or out of its purposely foggy, not to say impenetrable, pages. That, too, seemed politically canny, offering the president a militarized version of have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too-ism.

While the document only referred to the Pentagon budget-cutting process that had been making headlines for weeks in the most oblique manner, the briefings offered by the president, the secretary of defense and other top officials highlighted those “cuts”: $487 billion over the next decade. It was the sort of thing that should have made any deficit hawk’s heart flutter. Yet somehow — a bow to defense hawks? — the same budget, already humongous from an unprecedented 12 straight years of expansion, was, Obama assured his audience, actually slated to keep on growing.

Like a magician pulling the proverbial rabbit from the hat, the president described the situation this way: “Over the next 10 years, the growth in the defense budget will slow, but the fact of the matter is this: It will still grow, because we have global responsibilities that demand our leadership. In fact, the defense budget will still be larger than it was toward the end of the Bush administration.”

This magic trick was only possible because those headlined cuts were to come largely from the Pentagon’s “projected defense spending.” You’ll get the idea if you imagine an obese foodie announcing that he’s going to “diet” by cutting back on his dreams of future feasts, even as he modestly increases his actual caloric intake.

Surrounded by Panetta, Dempsey, the Joint Chiefs and the service secretaries, the president had so much more to offer. Those nasty, unwinnable, nation-building-style counterinsurgency wars “with large military footprints” were now a thing of the past. On them, the tide was, as he so poetically put it, receding. Yes, there would be losers — Army and Marine Corps troop strength was slated to drop by perhaps 80,000 to 100,000 in the coming decade — but weren’t they already the losers of wars no one wanted?

Listening to his presentation and those to follow, you could have been pardoned for imagining that we were already practically out of Afghanistan and looking to a time when everything military would be just cool as hell. In that future, there would be nothing but neat, high-tech military operations (and war toys) to the horizon.

These would include our latest perfect weapon, the pilotless drone; nifty cyberwar-style online combat; plenty of new spy and advanced surveillance gear; and sexy shadow wars, just the thing for “environments where adversaries try to deny us access.” Elite special operations forces — the secret military, cocooned inside the regular military, that took down Osama bin Laden — would be further expanded; and finally, there would be a “pivot to Asia” to confront the planet’s rising superpower, China, by sea and air, leaving all those nasty Arabs and Pashtuns and their messy, ugly guerrilla insurgencies, IEDs and suicide bombers behind.

It couldn’t have sounded cheerier once the media speculation began and it offered something for just about anyone who mattered in imperial Washington. In fact, as sober as Obama looked and as business-like as his surroundings were, if you closed your eyes, you could almost imagine a flight suit and an aircraft carrier deck, for this felt eerily like his “mission accomplished” moment.

Hostilities of the old nasty sort were practically at an end and a new era of high-tech, super-secret, elite warfare was upon us. The future would be so death-of-bin-Laden-ish all the way. It would be safe, secure and glorious in the hands of our reconfigured military and its efficiently reconfigured budget.

Military-First Imperial Realism

This particular reconfiguration also allowed the globe’s last great imperial power to put a smiley face on a decade of military disasters in the Greater Middle East and — for all the clever politics of the moment — to cry uncle in its own fashion. More miraculous yet, it was doing so without giving up its global military dreams.

It was a way of saying that, if the U.S. ever gets itself out of Afghanistan, when it comes to invading and occupying another Muslim land, building hundreds of bases and an embassy the size of the Ritz, and running riot in the name of “nation-building” and democracy: never again — or not for a few decades anyway.

Consider this a form of begrudging imperial realism that managed never to leave behind that essential American stance of garrisoning the planet. In fact, in order to fly all those drones and land all those special operations units, Washington may need more, not less bases globally. And of course, those 11 carrier battle groups are themselves floating bases, massively armed American small towns at sea.

As it happens, though, we already know how this story ends and it’s nothing to write home about. Yes, they’re going with what’s hot, especially those drones. But keep in mind that, only a few years ago, the hottest thing in town was counterinsurgency warfare and its main proponent, General David Petraeus, was being hailed as a new Alexander the Great, Napoleon, or U.S. Grant. And you know what happened there.

Now, counterinsurgency is history. The new hot ticket of the moment, that “revolutionary weapon” of our time — the drone or robotic airplane — is to fit the bill instead. Drones are, without a doubt, technologically remarkable and growing more sophisticated by the year. But air power has historically proved a poor choice if you want to accomplish anything political on the ground. It hardly matters whether those planes in the distant heavens have pilots or not, or whether they can see ants crawl from 20,000 feet and blast them away with precision.

Despite hosannas about the air war in Libya, count on one thing: air power will prove predictably inept when it comes to an American version of “revolutionary” counterterror warfare in the twenty-first century. So much for the limits of realism.

Washington-style realism assumes that we made a few mistakes, which can be rectified with the help of advanced technology and without endangering the military-industrial-crony-capitalist way of life. That’s about as radical as Obama’s Washington is likely to get.

When compared to the Republicans (Ron Paul aside again) storming the rhetorical barricades daily, threatening war with Iran nightly, promising to reinvade Iraq, or swearing that a military budget larger than those of the next 10 countries combined is wussiness itself, the Obama administration’s approach does look like shining realism. Up against this planet as it actually is today, its military-first policies look like wishful thinking.

What Drones Can’t Do

Climate-change advocates sometimes say that we’re on a new planet. (Bill McKibben calls it “Eaarth,” with that ungainly extra “a” to signify an ungainly place that used to be comfy enough for humanity.) It is, they say, a planet under pressure and destabilizing in all sorts of barely imagined ways.

Here’s the strange thing, though. Set aside climate change, and to the passing, modestly apocalyptic eye, this planet still looks as if it were destabilizing. Your three economic powerhouses — the European Union, China and the United States — are all teetering at the edge of interrelated financial crises. The EU seems to be literally destabilizing. It’s now perfectly reasonable to suggest that the present Eurozone may, within years, be Eurozones (or worse). Who knows when European banks, up to their elbows in bad debt, will start to tumble or whole countries like Greece go down (whatever that may mean)?

At the same time, the Chinese, with the hottest economy on the planet, have a housing bubble, which may already be bursting. (Americans should have at least a few passing memories of just what kinds of troubles a popped housing bubble can bring.) And for all we know, the U.S. economy, despite recent headlines about growing consumer confidence and an unemployment rate dropping to 8.5 percent, may be on life support.

As for the rest of the world, it looks questionable as well. The powerhouse Indian economy, like the Brazilian one, is slowing down. Whatever the glories of the Arab Spring, the Middle East is now in tumult and shows no signs of righting itself economically or politically any time soon. And don’t forget the Obama administration’s attempt to ratchet up sanctions on Iranian oil. If things go wrong, that might end up sending energy prices right through the roof and blowing back on the global economy in painful ways. With the major economies of the globe balancing on a pin, the possibility of a spike in those prices thanks to any future U.S./Iran/Israeli crisis should be terrifying.

The globalization types of the 1990s used to sing hymns to the way this planet was morphing into a single economic creature. It’s worth keeping in mind that it remains so in bad times. This year could, of course, be another bumble-through year of protest and tumult, or it could be something much worse. And don’t think that I — a non-economist of the first order — am alone in such fears. The new head of the International Monetary Fund, Christine Lagarde, has been traveling the planet recently making Jeremiah sound like an optimist, suggesting that we could, in fact, be at the edge of another global Great Depression.

But know this: You can buy drones till they’re coming out your ears and they won’t help keep Greece afloat for an extra second. Expand special operations forces to your heart’s content and you still can’t send them into those failing European banks. Take over cyberspace or outer space and you won’t prevent a Chinese housing bubble from bursting. None of the crucial problems on this planet are, in fact, amenable to military solutions, not even by a country willing to pour its treasure into previously unheard of military and national security expenditures.

Over the years, “the perfect storm” came to be a perfectly overused cliché, which is why you don’t see it much any more. But it might be worth dusting off and keeping in reserve this year and next — just in case. After all, when any situation destabilizes, all bets are off, including for a president having his mission accomplished moment. (Just ask John McCain what happened to his 2008 presidential bid when the economy suddenly began to melt down.)

In such a situation, the sort of military-first policy the president has made his own couldn’t be more useless. Maybe it’s time to take out a little insurance. Just not with AIG.

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Only when the Iraqis simply refused to guarantee those troops immunity from local law did the last Americans begin to cross the border into Kuwait.  It was only then that our top officials began to hail the thing they had never wanted, the end of the American military presence in Iraq, as marking an era of “accomplishment.”  They also began praising their own “decision” to leave as a triumph, and proclaimed that the troops were departing with — as the president put it — “their heads held high.”

In a final flag-lowering ceremony in Baghdad, clearly meant for U.S. domestic consumption and well attended by the American press corps but not by Iraqi officials or the local media, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta spoke glowingly of having achieved “ultimate success.”  He assured the departing troops that they had been a “driving force for remarkable progress” and that they could proudly leave the country “secure in knowing that your sacrifice has helped the Iraqi people begin a new chapter in history, free from tyranny and full of hope for prosperity and peace.”  Later on his trip to the Middle East, speaking of the human cost of the war, he added, “I think the price has been worth it.”

And then the last of those troops really did “come home” — if you define “home” broadly enough to include not just bases in the U.S. but also garrisons in Kuwait, elsewhere in the Persian Gulf and sooner or later in Afghanistan.

On December 14th at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, the president and his wife gave returning war veterans from the 82nd Airborne Division and other units a rousing welcome.  With some in picturesque maroon berets, they picturesquely hooahed the man who had once called their war “dumb.” Undoubtedly looking toward his 2012 campaign, President Obama, too, now spoke stirringly of “success” in Iraq, of “gains,” of his pride in the troops, of the country’s “gratitude” to them, of the spectacular accomplishments achieved as well as the hard times endured by “the finest fighting force in the history of the world,” and of the sacrifices made by our “wounded warriors” and “fallen heroes.”

He praised “an extraordinary achievement nine years in the making,” framing their departure this way: “Indeed, everything that American troops have done in Iraq — all the fighting and all the dying, the bleeding and the building, and the training and the partnering — all of it has led to this moment of success… [W]e’re leaving behind a sovereign, stable and self-reliant Iraq, with a representative government that was elected by its people.”

And these themes — including the “gains” and the “successes,” as well as the pride and gratitude, which Americans were assumed to feel for the troops — were picked up by the media and various pundits.  At the same time, other news reports were highlighting the possibility that Iraq was descending into a new sectarian hell, fueled by an American-built but largely Shiite military, in a land in which oil revenues barely exceeded the levels of the Saddam Hussein era, in a capital city which still had only a few hours of electricity a day, and that was promptly hit by a string of bombings and suicide attacks from an al-Qaeda affiliated group (nonexistent before the invasion of 2003), even as the influence of Iran grew and Washington quietly fretted.

A Consumer Society at War

It’s true that, if you were looking for low-rent victories in a near trillion-dollar war, this time, as various reporters and pundits pointed out, U.S. diplomats weren’t rushing for the last helicopter off an embassy roof amid chaos and burning barrels of dollars.  In other words, it wasn’t Vietnam and, as everyone knew, that was a defeat.  In fact, as other articles pointed out, our — as no fitting word has been found for it, let’s go with — withdrawal was a magnificent feat of reverse engineering, worthy of a force that was a nonpareil on the planet.

Even the president mentioned it.  After all, having seemingly moved much of the U.S. to Iraq, leaving was no small thing.  When the U.S. military began stripping the 505 bases it had built there at the cost of unknown multibillions of taxpayer dollars, it sloughed off $580 million worth of no-longer-wanted equipment on the Iraqis.  And yet it still managed to ship to Kuwait, other Persian Gulf garrisons, Afghanistan and even small towns in the U.S. more than two million items ranging from Kevlar armored vests to port-a-potties.  We’re talking about the equivalent of 20,000 truckloads of materiel.

Not surprisingly, given the society it comes from, the U.S. military fights a consumer-intensive style of war and so, in purely commercial terms, the leaving of Iraq was a withdrawal for the ages.  Nor should we overlook the trophies the military took home with it, including a vast Pentagon database of thumbprints and retinal scans from approximately 10 percent of the Iraqi population.  (A similar program is still underway in Afghanistan.)

When it came to “success,” Washington had a good deal more than that going for it.  After all, it plans to maintain a Baghdad embassy so gigantic it puts the Saigon embassy of 1973 to shame.  With a contingent of 16,000 to 18,000 people, including a force of perhaps 5,000 armed mercenaries (provided by private security contractors like Triple Canopy with its $1.5 billion State Department contract), the “mission” leaves any normal definition of “embassy” or “diplomacy” in the dust.

In 2012 alone, it is slated to spend $3.8 billion, a billion of that on a much criticized police-training program, only 12 percent of whose funds actually go to the Iraqi police.  To be left behind in the “postwar era,” in other words, will be something new under the sun.

Still, set aside the euphemisms and the soaring rhetoric, and if you want a simple gauge of the depths of America’s debacle in the oil heartlands of the planet, consider just how the final unit of American troops left Iraq. According to Tim Arango and Michael Schmidt of the New York Times, they pulled out at 2:30 a.m. in the dead of night.  No helicopters off rooftops, but 110 vehicles setting out in the dark from Contingency Operating Base Adder.  The day before they left, according to the Times reporters, the unit’s interpreters were ordered to call local Iraqi officials and sheiks with whom the Americans had close relations and make future plans, as if everything would continue in the usual way in the week to come.

In other words, the Iraqis were meant to wake up the morning after to find their foreign comrades gone, without so much as a goodbye.  This is how much the last American unit trusted its closest local allies.  After shock and awe, the taking of Baghdad, the mission-accomplished moment, and the capture, trial and execution of Saddam Hussein, after Abu Ghraib and the bloodletting of the civil war, after the surge and the Sunni Awakening movement, after the purple fingers and the reconstruction funds gone awry, after all the killing and the dying, the U.S. military slipped into the night without a word.

If, however, you did happen to be looking for a word or two to capture the whole affair, something less polite than those presently circulating, “debacle” and “defeat” might fit the bill.  The military of the self-proclaimed single greatest power of planet Earth, whose leaders once considered the occupation of the Middle East the key to future global policy and planned for a multi-generational garrisoning of Iraq, had been sent packing.  That should have been considered little short of stunning.

Face what happened in Iraq directly and you know that you’re on a new planet.

Doubling Down on Debacle

Of course, Iraq was just one of our invasions-turned-counterinsurgencies-turned-disasters.  The other, which started first and is still ongoing, may prove the greater debacle.  Though less costly so far in both American lives and national treasure, it threatens to become the more decisive of the two defeats, even though the forces opposing the U.S. military in Afghanistan remain an ill-armed, relatively weak set of minority insurgencies.

As great as was the feat of building the infrastructure for a military occupation and war in Iraq, and then equipping and supplying a massive military force there year after year, it was nothing compared to what the U.S had to do in Afghanistan.  Someday, the decision to invade that country, occupy it, build more than 400 bases there, surge in an extra 60,000 or more troops, masses of contractors, CIA agents, diplomats and other civilian officials, and then push a weak local government to grant Washington the right to remain more or less in perpetuity will be seen as the delusional actions of a Washington incapable of gauging the limits of its power in the world.

Talk about learning curves: Having watched their country fail disastrously in a major war on the Asian mainland three decades earlier, America’s leaders somehow convinced themselves that nothing was beyond the military prowess of the “sole superpower.”  So they sent more than 250,000 American troops (along with all those Burger Kings, Subways and Cinnabons) into two land wars in Eurasia.  The result has been another chapter in a history of American defeat — this time of a power that, despite its pretensions, was not only weaker than in the Vietnam era, but also far weaker than its leaders were capable of imagining.

You would think that, after a decade of watching this double debacle unfold, there might be a full-scale rush for the exits.  And yet the drawdown of U.S. “combat” troops in Afghanistan is not scheduled to be completed until December 31, 2014 (with thousands of advisors, trainers and special operations forces slated to remain behind); the Obama administration is still negotiating feverishly with the government of Afghan President Hamid Karzai on an agreement that — whatever the euphemisms chosen — would leave Americans garrisoned there for years to come; and, as in Iraq in 2010 and 2011, American commanders are openly lobbying for an even slower withdrawal schedule.

Again as in Iraq, in the face of the obvious, the official word couldn’t be peachier.  In mid-December, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta actually told frontline American troops there that they were “winning” the war.  Our commanders there similarly continue to tout “progress” and “gains,” as well as a weakening of the Taliban grip on the Pashtun heartland of southern Afghanistan, thanks to the flooding of the region with U.S. surge troops and continual, devastating night raids by U.S. special operations forces.

Nonetheless, the real story in Afghanistan remains grim for a squirming former superpower — as it has been ever since its occupation resuscitated the Taliban, the least popular popular movement imaginable. Typically, the U.N. has recently calculated that “security-related events” in the first 11 months of 2011 rose 21 percent over the same period in 2010 (something denied by NATO).  Similarly, yet more resources are being poured into an endless effort to build and train Afghan security forces.  Almost $12 billion went into the project in 2011 and a similar sum is slated for 2012, and yet those forces still can’t operate on their own, nor do they fight particularly effectively (though their Taliban opposites have few such problems).

Afghan police and soldiers continue to desert in droves and the U.S. general in charge of the training operation suggested last year that, to have the slightest chance of success, it would need to be extended through at least 2016 or 2017.  (Forget for a moment that an impoverished Afghan government will be utterly incapable of supporting or financing the forces being created for it.)

The Pashtun-based Taliban, like any classic guerrilla force, has faded away before the overwhelming military of a major power, yet it still clearly has significant control over the southern countryside, and in the last year its acts of violence have spread ever more deeply into the non-Pashtun north.  And if U.S. forces in Iraq didn’t trust their local partners at the moment of departure, Americans in Afghanistan have every reason to be far more nervous.  Afghans in police or army uniforms — some trained by the Americans or NATO, some possibly Taliban guerrillas dressed in outfits bought on the black market — have regularly turned their guns on their putative allies in what’s referred to as “green-on-blue violence.”  As 2011 ended, for instance, an Afghan army soldier shot and killed two French soldiers.  Not long before, several NATO troops were wounded when a man in an Afghan army uniform opened fire on them.

In the meantime, U.S. troop strength is starting to drop; NATO allies look unsteady indeed; and the Taliban, whatever its trials and tribulations, undoubtedly senses that time is on its side.

Depending on the Kindness of Strangers

Weak as the several outfits that make up the Taliban may be, there can be no question that they are preparing to successfully outlast the greatest military power of our time.  And mind you, none of this does more than touch on the debacle that the Afghan War could become.  If you want to judge the full folly of the American war (and gauge the waning of U.S. power globally), don’t even bother to look at Afghanistan.  Instead, check out the supply lines leading to it.

After all, Afghanistan is a landlocked country in Central Asia.  The U.S. is thousands of miles away.  No giant ports-cum-bases as at Cam Ranh Bay in South Vietnam in the 1960s are available to bring in supplies.  For Washington, if the guerrillas it opposes go to war with little more than the clothes on their backs, its military is another matter.  From meals to body armor, building supplies to ammunition, it needs a massive — and massively expensive — supply system.  It also guzzles fuel the way a drunk downs liquor and has spent more than $20 billion in Afghanistan and Iraq annually just on air conditioning.

To keep itself in good shape, it must rely on tortuous supply lines thousands of miles long.  Because of this, it is not the arbiter of its own fate in Afghanistan, though this seems to have gone almost unnoticed for years.

Of all the impractical wars a declining empire could fight, the Afghan one may be the most impractical of all.  Hand it to the Soviet Union, at least its “bleeding wound” — the phrase Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev gave to its Afghan debacle of the 1980s — was conveniently next door.  For the nearly 91,000 American troops now in that country, their 40,000 NATO counterparts and thousands of private contractors, the supplies that make the war possible can only enter Afghanistan three ways: perhaps 20 percent come in by air at staggering expense; more than a third arrive by the shortest and cheapest route — through the Pakistani port of Karachi, by truck or train north and then by truck across narrow mountain defiles; and perhaps 40 percent (only “non-lethal” supplies allowed) via the Northern Distribution Network (NDN).

The NDN was fully developed only beginning in 2009, when it belatedly became clear to Washington that Pakistan had a potential stranglehold on the American war effort.  Involving at least 16 countries and just about every form of transport imaginable, the NDN is actually three routes, two of them via Russia, that funnel just about everything through the bottleneck of corrupt, autocratic Uzbekistan.

In other words, simply to fight its war, Washington has made itself dependent on the kindness of strangers — in this case, Pakistan and Russia.  It’s one thing when a superpower or great power on the rise casts its lot with countries that may not be natural allies; it’s quite a different story when a declining power does so.  Russian leaders are already making noises about the viability of the northern route if the U.S. continues to displease it on the placement of its prospective European missile defense system.

But the more immediate psychodrama of the Afghan War is in Pakistan.  There, the massive resupply operation is already a major scandal.  It was estimated, for instance, that, in 2008, 12 percent of all U.S. supplies heading from Karachi to Bagram Air Base went missing somewhere en route.  In what Karachi’s police chief has called “the mother of all scams,” 29,000 cargo loads of U.S. supplies have disappeared after being unloaded at that port.

In fact, the whole supply system — together with the local security and protection agreements and bribes to various groups that are part and parcel of it along the way — has evidently helped fund and supply the Taliban, as well as stocking every bazaar en route and supporting local warlords and crooks of every sort.

Recently, in response to American air strikes that killed 24 of their border troops, the Pakistani leadership forced the Americans to leave Shamsi air base, where the CIA ran some of its drone operations, successfully pressured Washington into at least temporarily halting its drone air campaign in Pakistan’s borderlands, and closed the border crossings through which the whole American supply system must pass.  They remain closed almost two months later.  Without those routes, in the long run, the American war simply cannot be fought.

Though those crossings are likely to be reopened after a significant renegotiation of U.S.-Pakistani relations, the message couldn’t be clearer.  The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as in those Pakistani borderlands, have not only drained American treasure, but exposed the relative helplessness of the “sole superpower.”  Ten (or even five) years ago, the Pakistanis would simply never have dared to take actions like these.

As it turned out, the power of the U.S. military was threateningly impressive, but only until George W. Bush pulled the trigger twice.  In doing so, he revealed to the world that the U.S. could not win distant land wars against minimalist enemies or impose its will on two weak countries in the Greater Middle East.  Another reality was exposed as well, even if it has taken time to sink in: we no longer live on a planet where it’s obvious how to leverage staggering advantages in military technology into any other kind of power.

In the process, all the world could see what the United States was: the other declining power of the Cold War era.  Washington’s state of dependence on the Eurasian mainland is now clear enough, which means that, whatever “agreements” are reached with the Afghan government, the future in that country is not American.

Over the last decade, the U.S. has been taught a repetitive lesson when it comes to ground wars on the Eurasian mainland: don’t launch them.  The debacle of the impending double defeat this time around couldn’t be more obvious.  The only question that remains is just how humiliating the coming retreat from Afghanistan will turn out to be. The longer the U.S. stays, the more devastating the blow to its power.

All of this should hardly need to be said and yet, as 2012 begins, with the next political season already upon us, it is no less painfully clear that Washington will be incapable of ending the Afghan War any time soon.

At the height of what looked like success in Iraq and Afghanistan, American officials fretted endlessly about how, in the condescending phrase of the moment, to put an “Afghan face” or “Iraqi face” on America’s wars.  Now, at a nadir moment in the Greater Middle East, perhaps it’s finally time to put an American face on America’s wars, to see them clearly for the imperial debacles they have been — and act accordingly.

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In the course of his several meals, the president pledged his support for Israel (in the face of Republican charges that he is eternally soft on the subject), talked about “taxes and the economy” to his undoubtedly under-taxed listeners, and made this stirringly meaningless but rousing comment: “No matter who we are, no matter where we come from, we’re one nation. We’re one people. And that’s what’s at stake in this election.”

Outside his final event, Occupy Wall Street protesters saw something else at stake, dubbing him the “1 percent president.” The end result from a night’s heavy lifting: $2.4 million for his election campaign and the Democratic National Committee, nowhere close to 1 percent of what they will need for the next year.

These were the 67th, 68th and 69th fundraisers attended by Obama so far in 2011, or the 71st, 72nd and 73rd. (It depended on who was counting.) In either case, we’re talking about approximately one fundraiser every five days, a total of 6 percent of the events in which Obama took part in this non-election year.

Think about that. You vote for the president to spend some part of 20 percent of his days raising money for his own future from the incredibly wealthy. Or put another way, the Washington Post now estimates that if you add in the non-fundraising, election-oriented events that involve him — 63 so far in 2011 — perhaps 12 percent of his time is taken up with campaign efforts of one sort or another; and this is what he’s been doing 12 to 24 months before the election is scheduled to happen.

New York being the home of… gulp… Wall Street (1 percent! 1 percent!), Obama doesn’t exactly have it to himself. Mitt Romney was heading into town on December 14th for his own rousing round of four fundraisers. One at the Waldorf Astoria will be hosted by — you can’t be balder than this — four JPMorgan Chase executives, including James B. “Jimmy” Lee, Jr., the vice chairman of the company and the “banker who battled the Obama administration over the restructuring of Chrysler LLC.” And oh yes, Romney leads Obama in funding support from billionaires, 42 to 30 (with Rick Perry taking third place at 20).

In the 2008 election, JPMorgan employees gave $4.6 million to the candidates of their choice, coming in behind only Goldman Sachs and Citigroup on The Street. Now that, I would say, is actual electoral power. Perhaps it wouldn’t be too much of an exaggeration to say that the voting that matters most takes place at those fundraisers, not in the booths where, billions of dollars in attack ads later, the usual hoi polloi pull the handles on electoral slot machines.

Their Bread, Our Circus

In ancient Rome, the emperors provided the capital’s inhabitants with “bread and circuses.” Ever since, that combination has been shorthand for rulers buying off the ruled with the necessities of life and spectacle.

In Rome, that spectacle involved gladiatorial and other elaborate games of death that took place in the Colosseum. In this age, our rulers, the 1 percent whose money has flooded the electoral cycle, are turning the election itself into our extended circus. This year, a series of Republican televised “debates” have glued increasing numbers of eyeballs to screens — and not just Republican eyeballs, either. Everyone waits for the latest version of a reality show to produce the next cat fight, fabulous gaffe, late-night laugh line, confession, denial, scandal, or plot twist, the next thumbs up or, far better, thumbs down on some candidate’s increasingly brief political life in the arena.

Think of it as their bread and our circus. Who can doubt that, like the crowds of Rome once upon a time, we await the inevitable thumbs-down vote and the YouTube videos that precede and follow it with a kind of continuing bloodlust? The only problem: however strange all this may be, it’s not, at least in the old-fashioned sense, an election nor does it seem to have much to do with democracy. The fact is that we have no word for what’s going on. Semi-democracy? Unrepresentative democracy? 1 percent democracy? Demospectacracy?

Of course, we still speak of this as a presidential election campaign, and it’s true that 11 months from now more than 60 percent of the voting age population will step into polling booths across the country and cast ballots. But let’s face it, if this is an election at all, it’s certainly one stricken with elephantiasis. Once, as now, a presidential race had primaries, conventions, campaigning, mudslinging and sometimes even a few debates, but all of this had limits. In recent years, the limits — almost any limits — have been disappearing. Along the way, the process has expanded from an eight-month-long affair that most voters only began to attend to sometime in the fall of election year to a perpetual campaign, perpetually discussed, reported on, and displayed.

The primaries, for instance, have been on a forced march toward ever-earlier dates. Iowa’s — actually a “caucus” — is now on January 3rd of election year and the first official primary, New Hampshire’s is on January 10th. (Over the years, it’s repeatedly had to move its date forward from March to hold onto that status.) This time around, the “debates” leading up to the primaries began last May; previously meaningless party “straw polls,” covered as monumental events by hundreds of reporters, accompanied them; the first of a World War I-style barrage of attack ads was launched in the same period, and the opinion polls on various constellations of likely (or unlikely) candidates — what Jonathan Schell once called our “serial elections” — preceded everything, accompanied by endless media speculation about them.

It’s an ever-expanding system, engorging itself on money and sucking in ever larger audiences. It’s the Blob of this era. In fact, the next campaign now kicks off in the media the day after (if not the day before) the previous election ends with speculation (polls soon to follow) handicapping the odds of future candidates, none yet announced.

The Perpetual Campaign

Once upon a time, the perpetual candidate — former Minnesota governor Harold Stassen was the classic example — proved a kind of running joke. No longer. Now, the president himself essentially begins his campaign for a second term almost as soon as he enters the Oval Office.

Similarly, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, the media-anointed Republican nominee of this electoral cycle, has in fact been running for president since at least 2006. It’s been his only real “job” since leaving the governorship in 2008. In his life, he is now the embodiment of the perpetual candidate, and yet even those who make him the butt of endless TV jokes don’t find that fact strange or particularly worthy of comment.

Everywhere you care to look, the expansion of the presidential race is evident. In the fall of 1948, in an election he was supposed to lose, Democratic President Harry (“give ‘em hell”) Truman barnstormed the nation by train, decrying a “do-nothing Congress.” By comparison, President Obama has been out this fall — the equivalent of 1947 — on what is clearly the campaign trail denouncing his own version of a do-nothing Congress. And that’s only a start when it comes to turning election “year” into Election Life.

On money, the sky’s the limit. In 2000, the total federal election season cost $3 billion; in 2008, more than $5 billion, of which an estimated $2.4 billion went into the presidential campaign. With the Supreme Court having made it easier for outside money to pour in, thanks to its Citizens United decision, funding for campaign 2012 is expected to pass $6 billion and could even top $7 billion. The Obama campaign, which raised $760 million in 2008, is expected to pass the billion-dollar mark this time around (with money already pouring in from the financial and banking sector on which candidate Mitt Romney is also heavily reliant).

TV advertising alone, which topped $2.1 billion in 2008, is expected to reach or exceed $3 billion this time around. These are, of course, staggering sums. Already the attack ads, mostly on the president, mostly from the sort of Super PACs that Citizens United let loose in the land, are zinging away far in advance of any previous presidential campaign season. According to the Washington Post, $23 million worth of attack ads have come and gone, half of that from Karl Rove’s American Crossroads. And as one analyst quoted by the New York Times put it, “These dollar figures we’re talking about now are going to seem quaint in a few months. And they’ll seem really quaint in eight or nine months.”

For comparison’s sake, back in 1976, in the era when pundits were first beginning to write about presidential elections as perpetual campaigns, the total spending of presidential candidates Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter was $66.9 million.

This inundation of money has also meant an inundation of lobbyists. President Obama officially refuses to take campaign contributions from lobbyists. The New York Times recently reported, however, that 15 of his top “bundlers,” who give their own money and solicit that of others for the campaign — none registered as federal lobbyists — are “involved in lobbying for Washington consulting shops or private companies,” and they are raising millions for him. A June report from the Center for Public Integrity concluded: “President Obama granted plum jobs and appointments to almost 200 people who raised large sums for his [2008] presidential campaign, and his top fundraisers have won millions of dollars in federal contracts.”

And the 2012 Republican field of presidential contestants puts Obama in the shade. They seem determined to campaign cheek to jowl with as many lobbyists as they can corral. More than 100 federal lobbyists have already contributed to Mitt Romney’s campaign, while Rick Perry has evidently risen to candidate status on the shoulders of Mike Toomey, a former gubernatorial chief of staff, friend, and money-raising lobbyist whose clients “have won $2 billion in [Texas] state government contracts since 2008.” And that’s only scratching the surface.

In the meantime, a national machinery has been set up to staff that perpetual campaign. By early October (again 2011, not 2012), according to the New York Times, the Obama campaign had opened offices in 15 states, had paid employees in 38 states, and had a Chicago headquarters with a paid staff of 200. Thirteen months before the actual election, the Obama campaign and the Democratic National Committee had already shelled out “close to $87 million in operating costs.” At this point, there is no Republican equivalent, as the many Republican candidates are still involved in the struggle for the nomination, while Obama, as vulnerable a president as we’ve seen in our time, miraculously lacks even a symbolic primary challenger.

Money Talks

At the heart of the ever-expanding presidential campaign sit the media, especially television — especially those ads. In 1996, when Republican Robert Dole ran against President Bill Clinton, the two camps spent an estimated $113 million for ads, almost all for television. In the 2008 election for all federal offices, $2.7 billion went into television advertising.

This year, when the media is feeling the pinch of hard times, $3 billion dollars in prospective TV ads must look like manna from heaven. In fact — though no one in the media ever writes about it — this has to represent one of the great conflict of interest stories of our time, maybe of all time. The pundits, commentators, reporters, and news announcers who once again seem so intent on convincing us that this will be the election of the century are essentially drumming up business for the owners of their networks or cable stations who will profit handsomely, even staggeringly, from the dollars that those glued eyeballs bring in.

So Fox, for instance, is now a constant debate central for Republican candidates and is, in turn, pulling in advertising at a rate ahead of the 2008 campaign cycle. “Like CNN, MSNBC and others,” writes Dan Hirschhorn of Ad Age, “Fox News is set to benefit from the proliferation of third-party political and issue advocacy groups including Super PACs and 527s, which can afford national airtime and are gearing up to be major players in 2012 politics.”

And like any reality show, for this one to succeed so far ahead of its appointed season, you need the constant drama of contestants being ushered on and off stage, of spectacular rises and no less spectacular collapses. Hence, the stories of Michele Bachman, Rick Perry, and Herman Cain, which (if you were of a conspiratorial mind) might almost seem too good (or bad) to be true.

So far, the media’s election blitz has proven remarkably successful. The audience for the very first Republican debate of 2011 almost doubled the audience for the first Republican debate of the 2008 campaign. And as this round of debates has gained steam, it has nearly doubled its own initial numbers. Meanwhile, the media version of the election campaign is visibly becoming a too-big-to-fail juggernaut. In the process, it seems that we, the citizens, the viewers, have been given an election life sentence. Our job is to sit and watch while the action happens elsewhere.

It’s true that, on November 6, 2012, Americans will enter voting booths and choose a candidate for president, and that makes this an “election.” But thinking of it that way won’t get you far. It’s also true, that, on January 20, 2013, a newly elected president will step into the Oval Office. What any of this has to do with democracy, as opposed to spectacle, influence, corruption, the power of the incredibly wealthy to pay for and craft messages, and the power of media owners to enhance their profits is certainly an open question. Think, at least, how literally the old phrase “money talks” is being updated every time you hear the candidates, or see their ads, or get a robocall from one of them, or receive a geo-targeted mobile ad of theirs on your iPhone or Android.

It’s clear enough — or should be by now — that the electoral process has been occupied by the 1 percent; which means that what you hear in this “campaign” is largely refracted versions of their praise, their condemnation, their slurs, their views, their needs, their fears, and their wishes. They are making money off, and electing a president via, you. Which means that you — that all of us — are occupied, too.

So stop calling this an “election.” Whatever it is, we need a new name for it.

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You took me by surprise. For all I know, you took yourself by surprise, the first of you who arrived at Zuccotti Park and, inspired by a bunch of Egyptian students, didn’t go home again. And when the news of you penetrated my world, I didn’t pay much attention. So I wasn’t among the best and brightest when it came to you. But one thing’s for sure: you’ve had my attention these last weeks. I already feel years younger thanks to you (even if my legs don’t).

Decades ago in the Neolithic age we now call “the Sixties,” I was, like you: outraged. I was out in the streets (and in the library). I was part of the anti-Vietnam War movement. I turned in my draft card, joined a group called the Resistance, took part in the radical politics of the moment, researched the war, became a draft counselor, helped organize an anti-war Asian scholars group — I was at the time preparing to be a China scholar, before being swept away — began writing about (and against) the war, worked as an “underground” printer (there was nothing underground about us, but it sounded wonderful), and finally became an editor and journalist at an antiwar news service in San Francisco.

In that time of turmoil, I doubt I spent a moment pondering this irony: despite all those years in college and graduate school, the most crucial part of my education — learning about the nature of American power and how it was wielded — was largely self-taught in my off-hours. And I wasn’t alone. In those days, most of us found ourselves in a frenzy of teaching (each other), reading, writing — and acting. That was how I first became an editor (without even knowing what an editor was): simply by having friends shove their essays at me and ask for help.

Those were heady years, as heady, I have no doubt, as this moment is for you. But that doesn’t mean our moments were the same. Not by a long shot. Here’s one major difference: like so many of the young of that distant era, I was surfing the crest of a wave of American wealth and wellbeing. We never thought about, but also never doubted, that if this moment ended, there would be perfectly normal jobs — good ones — awaiting us, should we want them. It never crossed our minds that we couldn’t land on our feet in America, if we cared to.

In that sense, while we certainly talked about putting everything on the line, we didn’t; in truth, economically speaking, we couldn’t. Although you, the occupiers of Zuccotti Park and other encampments around the country, are a heterogeneous crew, many of you, I know, graduated from college in recent years.

Most of you were ushered off those leafy campuses (or their urban equivalents) with due pomp and ceremony, and plenty of what passes for inspiration. I’m ready to bet, though, that in those ceremonies no one bothered to mention that you (and your parents) had essentially been conned, snookered out of tens of thousands of dollars on the implicit promise that such an “education” would usher you into a profession or at least a world of decent jobs.

As you know better than I, you got soaked by the educational equivalent of a subprime mortgage. As a result, many of you were sent out of those gates and directly — as they say of houses that are worth less than what’s owed on their mortgages — underwater.

You essentially mortgaged your lives for an education and left college weighed down with so much debt — a veritable trillion-dollar bubble of it — that you may never straighten up, not if the 1 percent have their way. Worse yet, you were sent into a world just then being stripped of its finery, where decent jobs were going the way of TVs with antennas and rotary telephones.

Lost Worlds and Utopia

Here’s a weakness of mine: graduation speeches. I like their form, if not their everyday reality, and so from time to time give them unasked at TomDispatch.com, speeches for those of us already out in the world and seldom credited for never stopping learning.

In this case, though, don’t think of me as your graduation speaker. Think of this as a self-graduation. And this time, it’s positives all the way to the horizon. After all, you haven’t incurred a cent of debt, because you and those around you in Zuccotti Park are giving the classes you took. First, you began educating yourself in the realities of post-meltdown America, and then, miraculously enough, you went and educated many of the rest of us as well.

You really did change the conversation in this country in a heartbeat from, as Joshua Holland wrote at Alternet.org, “a relentless focus on the deficit to a discussion of the real issues facing Main Street: the lack of jobs… spiraling inequality, cash-strapped American families’ debt-loads, and the pernicious influence of money in politics that led us to this point” — and more amazingly yet, at no charge.

In other words, I’m not here, like the typical graduation speaker, to inspire you. I’m here to tell you how you’ve inspired me. In the four decades between the moment when I imagined I put everything on the line and the moment when you actually did, wealth and income inequalities exploded in ways unimaginable in the 1960s. For ordinary Americans, the numbers that translated into daily troubles began heading downhill in the 1990s, the Clinton years, and only a fraudulent bubble in home values kept the good times rolling until 2008.

Then, of course, it burst big time. But you know all this. Who knows better than you the story of the financial and political flim-flam artists who brought this country to its knees, made out like bandits and left the 99 percent in the dust? Three years of stunned silence followed, as if Americans simply couldn’t believe it, couldn’t take it in — if, that is, you leave aside the Tea Party movement.

But give those aging, angry whites credit. They were the first to cry out for a lost world (while denouncing some of the same bank bailouts and financial shenanigans you have). That was before, in a political nano-second, the phrase “Tea Party” was essentially trademarked, occupied and made the property of long-time Republican operatives, corporate cronies and various billionaires.

That won’t happen to you. Among your many strengths, the lack of a list of demands that so many of your elders have complained about, your inclusiveness and your utopian streak — the urge to create a tiny, thoroughly democratic new society near the beating financial heart of the old one — will make you far harder to co-opt. Add in the fact that, while any movement taking on inequity and unfairness is political, you are also, in the usual sense of the term, a strikingly apolitical movement. Again, this is, to my mind, part of your strength. It ensures that neither the Democratic Party nor left sects will find it easy to get a toehold in your environs. Yes, in the long run, if you last and grow (as I suspect you will), a more traditional kind of politics may form around you, but it’s unlikely to abscond with you as those Republican operatives did with the Tea Party.

Actuarially, the Tea Party is a movement of the past in mourning for a lost world and the good life that went with it. All you have to do is look at the sudden, post-2008 burst of poverty in the suburbs, that golden beacon of the post-World War II American dream, to know that something unprecedented is underway.

Once upon a time, no one imagined that an American world of home ownership and good jobs, of cheap gas and cheaper steaks, would ever end. Nonetheless, it was kneecapped over the last few decades and it’s not coming back. Not for you or your children, no matter what happens economically.

So don’t kid yourself: whether you know it or not, young as you are, you’re in mourning, too, or Occupy Wall Street wouldn’t exist. Unlike the Tea Party, however, you are young, which means that you’re also a movement of the unknown future, which is your strength.

Self-Education U.

Let me fess up here to my fondness for libraries (even though I find their silence unnerving). As a child, I lived in the golden age of your lost world, but as something of an outsider. The 1950s weren’t a golden age for my family, and they weren’t particularly happy years for me. I was an only child, and my escape was into books. Less than a block from where I lived was a local branch of the New York City public library and, in those days before adult problems had morphed into TV fare, I repaired there, like Harriet the Spy, to get the scoop on the mysterious world of grown-ups. (The only question then was whether the librarian would let you out of the children’s section; mine did.)

I remembering hauling home piles of books, including John Toland’s “But Not in Shame,” Isaac Asimov’s space operas and “Désirée”(a racy pop novel about a woman Napoleon loved), often with little idea what they were and no one to guide me. On the shelves in my small room were yet more books, including most of the Harvard Five Foot Shelf, a collection of 51 classic volumes. My set had been rescued from somebody’s flooded basement, their spines slightly warped and signs of mildew on some of them. But I can still remember taking them off my shelf with a certain wonder: Dana’s “Two Years Before the Mast” (thrilling!), Darwin’s “The Origins of the Species” (impenetrable), Homer’s “The Odyssey” (Cyclops!) and so on.

Books — Johannes Gutenberg’s more than 500-year-old “technology” — were my companions, my siblings and also my building blocks. To while away the hours, I would pile them up to create the landscape — valleys and mountains — within which my toy soldiers fought their battles. So libraries and self-education, that’s a program in my comfort zone.

Though my route seemed happenstantial at the time, it’s probably no accident that, 35 years ago, I ended up as a book editor on the periphery of mainstream publishing and stayed there. After all, it was a paid excuse to retreat to my room with books (to-be) and, if not turn them into mountains and valleys, then at least transform them into a kind of eternal play and self-education.

All of which is why, on arriving for the first time at your encampment in Zuccotti Park and taking that tiny set of steps down from Broadway, I was moved to find myself in, of all things, an informal open-air library. The People’s Library no less, even if books sorted by category in plastic bins on tables isn’t exactly the way I once imagined The Library.

Still, it couldn’t be more appropriate for Occupy Wall Street, with its long, open-air meetings, its invited speakers and experts, its visiting authors, its constant debates and arguments, that feeling when you’re there that you can talk to anyone.

Like the best of library systems, it’s a Self-Education U., or perhaps a modern version of the Chautauqua adult education movement. Your goal, it seems, is to educate yourselves and then the rest of us in the realities and inequities of twenty-first century American life.

Still, for the advanced guard of your electronic generation to commit itself so publicly to actual books, ones you can pick up, leaf through, hand to someone else — that took me by surprise. Those books, all donations, are flowing in from publishers (including Metropolitan Books, where I work, and Haymarket Books, which publishes me), private bookstores, authors and well, just about anyone. As I stood talking with some of you, the librarians of Zuccotti Park, I watched people arriving, unzipping backpacks and handing over books.

Of the thousands of volumes you now have, some, as in any library, are indeed taken out and returned, but some not. As Bill Scott, a librarian sitting in front of a makeshift “reference table” in muffler and jacket told me, “The books are donated to us and we donate them to others.”

A youthful-looking 42, Scott, an associate professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh, is spending his sabbatical semester camped out in the park. His book, “Troublemakers,” is just about to be published and he’s bubbling with enthusiasm. He’s ordered a couple of copies to donate himself. “It’s my first book ever. I’ve never even held it in my hands. To shelve the first copy in the People’s Library, it’s like all the strands of my life coming together!”

Think of it: Yes, your peers in the park were texting and tweeting and streaming up a video storm. They were social networking circles around the 1 percent , the mayor, the police and whoever else got in their way. Still, there you all were pushing a technology already relegated by many to the trash bin of cultural history. You were betting your bottom dollar on the value to your movement of real books, the very things that kept me alive as a kid, that I’ve been editing, publishing and even writing for more than three decades.

“I Wanted Something Productive to Do”

That library — in fact, those libraries at Occupy Boston, Occupy Washington, Occupy San Francisco and other encampments — may be the least commented upon part of your movement. And yet, you set your library up not as an afterthought or a sideline, but almost as soon as you began imagining a society worth living in, a little world of your own. You didn’t forget the books, which means you didn’t forget about education. I mean, a real education.

This was both generous of you and, quite simply, inspiring. Who would have expected that the old-fashioned, retro book would be at the heart of this country’s great protest movement of a tarnished new century?

When asked how the library began, librarian “Scales” (aka Sam Smith), an unemployed, 20-year-old blond dancer still in shorts on a chilly fall day, responded, “Nobody knows exactly who started it. It was like an immaculate conception. It was just here.” If the movement itself were a book, that might stand as its epigraph. Even if Occupy Wall Street indeed did start somewhere (as did its library), the way it has exploded globally in a historical nanosecond, does give it exactly the feeling Scales described.

When asked why he himself was here, he simply said, “I wanted something productive to do.”

In an economy where “production” is gone with the wind, that makes the deepest sense to me. Who doesn’t want to be productive in life? Why should a generation that Wall Street and Washington seem perfectly happy to sideline not want to produce something of their own, as they now have?

I was no less touched, while listening in on a long meeting of the Library Working Group one Saturday afternoon amid the chaos of Zuccotti Park — crowd noise all around us, a band playing nearby — when the woman standing next to me interrupted your meeting. She identified herself as an elected legislator from an upstate New York county who had driven down to see Occupy Wall Street for herself. She just wanted you, the librarians, to know that she supported what you were doing and that, while her county was still funding its libraries, it was getting ever harder to do so, given strapped state and local budgets.

In other words, as education is priced out of the reach of so many Americans and in many communities library hours are cut back or local libraries shut down, you’ve opened for business.

Here are just a few things that you, the librarians of Zuccotti Park, said to me:

Bill Scott: “Part of the reason we’re down here is because we live in a society which promotes the idea that education should be bought and sold on the open market. We want to establish it as a human right. What the People’s Library proves is that books belong to the people, as does education. People with student-loan debt find their freedom and options limited. It severely limited my options. I’m still crawling out from under a ton of debt.”

Zachary Loeb, who in what passes for real life is an actual librarian: “I’m working part time, so I wake up every morning and spend two hours sending out resumes, but the work isn’t out there. My training’s in archiving, but nobody’s hiring. I got a degree in library science, not philosophy, which I wanted to go into, to be on a job track. Obviously, I’m not. Lots of people are here because the work situation is abysmal.

“I’ve been an activist for a long time. I read [the magazine] Adbusters and saw the call to occupy Wall Street. I was down here on the first day. I think we’ve changed the conversation in this country. We’ve given people permission to stand up, to talk to each other, test their ideas out against each other and consider decisions that shouldn’t simply be made by the powerful in Washington.”

Frances Mercanti-Anthony, out-of-work actress (“my last play closed in August”) and comic writer: “Knowledge is the greatest weapon we have. What we’re doing is offering knowledge to people who have been disenfranchised. Our online database of books [in the People's Library] stands as a great symbol of the movement, of democracy, of knowledge and sharing.”

Lighting Up the Landscape

Here’s what you’ve done: your anger and your thoughtfulness — what you don’t know and don’t mind not knowing, as well as what you do know — has lit up a previously dismal landscape. And every move made by those who want to get rid of you has only spurred your growth.

I’m a pretty levelheaded guy, but call me a little starry-eyed right now and I don’t mind at all. It’s something to feel this way for the first time in I don’t know how long and whatever happens from now on, I can thank you for that — and for the sudden sense of possibility that goes with it.

Only six weeks into your movement, with so little known about where you’re going or what will happen, it’s undoubtedly early for graduation ceremonies. Still, let’s face it, you’ve been growing up fast and, for all we know, these could have been the six weeks that changed the world. Anyway, there’s no limit out here, where you can make your own traditions, on how often you can graduate yourself.

So I say, go for it. Mark your progress thus far. Self-graduate. You don’t need me. I’ll stay here and borrow a book from your library — and later, when I’m done, just as you suggest, I’ll donate it to someone else.

Shoulder your handmade signs. Lift them high. Chant your chants. Let the drummers play as you march. Head out toward Wall Street, toward the future, looking back over your shoulder, remembering exactly what your elders squandered, the world they left you, the debts they piled on you. And the next time they start telling you what you should do with your movement, take it with a grain of salt. The future, after all, is yours, not theirs. It may be the only thing you have, exactly because it’s so beautifully unknown, so deeply unpredictable. It’s your advantage over them because it’s one thing that Washington and Wall Street have no more way of controlling than you do.

In a world of increasing misery, you carry not just your debts, but ours too. It’s a burden no one should shoulder, especially with winter bearing down and that 1 percent of adults waiting for the cold to make tempers short, hoping you’ll begin to fall out, grow discouraged and find life too miserable to bear, hoping that a New York winter will freeze you out of your own movement.

I take heart that last weekend, on a beautiful fall day, you, the librarians, were already discussing the need to buy “Alaska-style” sleeping bags and a generator which would give you heat; that you, like the mayor, are looking ahead and planning for winter. This, after all, could be your Valley Forge. As actress-librarian Mercanti-Anthony told me: “We have the whole world behind us at this point. We want to stand our ground for the long haul. If we can make it through the winter, this occupation is here to stay.”

And she just might be right. So head out now and whatever you do, don’t go home. It’s underwater anyway and we need you. We really do. The world’s in a hell of a mess, but what a time for you to take it in your own hands and do your damnedest.

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And here’s the paragraph, buried in the middle of their piece, that should have stopped readers in their tracks:

“Or consider what American computer specialists are doing on the Internet, perhaps terrorist leaders’ greatest safe haven, where they recruit, raise money, and plot future attacks on a global scale. American specialists have become especially proficient at forging the onscreen cyber-trademarks used by Al-Qaida to certify its Web statements, and are posting confusing and contradictory orders, some so virulent that young Muslims dabbling in jihadist philosophy, but on the fence about it, might be driven away.”

The italics are mine, and as the authors urge us to do, let’s consider for a moment this tiny, remarkably bizarre window into military reality. As a start, just where those military “computer specialists” are remains unknown. Perhaps they are in the Pentagon, perhaps somewhere in the National Counterterrorism Center, but whoever and wherever they are, here’s the question of the week, possibly of the month or the year: Just what kind of “orders” can they be posting “so virulent that young Muslims dabbling in jihadist philosophy, but on the fence about it, might be driven away”?

And even if our computer experts really were capable of turning wavering young Muslims back from the shores of jihadism — and personally I wouldn’t put my money on the Pentagon’s skills in that realm — what about young Muslims (or older ones for that matter) who weren’t on that fence and took those “orders” seriously? What exactly are they being “ordered” to do?

Talk about a potential Frankenstein situation — and all we can do is ask questions. Just what monsters, for example, might the military’s computer specialists be helping to forge? And who exactly is supervising those “specialists” and their vituperative messages? (Especially since they are unlikely to be in English, and we already know that Arabic, Pashto, Dari, and Farsi speakers at the higher levels, or even lower levels, of the Pentagon are, at best, few and far between.)

Keep in mind that we already have an example of a similarly wacky program lacking meaningful oversight that went awry, hit the headlines, and resulted in the perfectly real deaths of at least one U.S. Border Patrol agent and undoubtedly many more Mexicans. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives launched its now infamous gun-tracking program in Arizona in late 2009, under the moniker “Operation Fast and Furious” (a reference to a series of movies about street car racers). It was meant to track cross-border gun sales to Mexico’s drug cartels by actually letting perfectly real weapons cross the border — more than 2,000 of them, as it turned out. ATF agents, according to a Washington Post report, would be “instructed not to move in and question the [gun runners] but to let the guns go and see where they eventually ended up.” And so they did for more than a year and, not exactly surprisingly, those weapons ended up “on the street” and in the ugliest of hands.

The “Daily Show’s” Jon Stewart asked an apt question about the program: “The ATF plan to prevent American guns from being used in Mexican gun violence is to provide Mexican gangs with American guns. If this is the plan that they went with, what plan did we reject?”

Assumedly, the same question could be asked of the military’s online anti-jihadist program, involving as it evidently does messages believed to be too extreme for wavering young Muslims with an interest in the jihadi “philosophy.” Shouldn’t someone start asking whether those Pentagon’s “orders” to jihadis might not turn out to be the online equivalent of so many loose guns?

After all, what are those specialists ordering them to do? And if actual jihadis actually tried to follow those “confusing and contradictory orders,” possibly being confused and contradictory kinds of guys, if they took them seriously and interpreted them in ways not predicted by their putative Pentagon handlers, is there a possibility that anyone could die as a result? And if such messages turn off some prospective jihadis, isn’t it possible that they might turn on others? And could they, for instance, have been ordered to commit confused and contradictory acts that might end up involving Americans?

Really, someone should blow Schmitt and Shanker’s paragraph up to giant size, tack it up somewhere in the Capitol, and call for a congressional investigation. If the ATF could do it, why not the Pentagon? And honestly, is this how Americans want to see their tax dollars spent?

Read the Schmitt and Shanker piece and you’ll get a sense of what Shakespeare might have called the “oerweening pride” rife in the Pentagon when it comes to their skills and their ability to put one (or two, or three) over on the jihadist community. So pleased with themselves were they, that they evidently couldn’t help bragging to the two reporters about their skills. The old phrase “too smart for your own good” comes to mind. It’s enough to make you worry, even based on so little information (which the new book from the two reporters may significantly amplify).

And by the way, if you want another unsettling analogy, when it comes to off-the-wall ideas for “deterring” jihadist networks, check out the major record companies and their efforts to deter communities and individuals from illegally downloading music. The Recording Industry Association of America, representing the four major record labels, decided to make a cautionary example of Jammie Thomas-Rasset, a Minnesota mom, by suing her “for illegally downloading and sharing 24 songs on the peer-to-peer file-sharing network Kazaa in 2006.” So far, the organization has dragged her through three trials, getting terrible publicity. Even if they win and leave her in hock for the rest of her life, do you think for one second that they will have made a dent in the world of illegal downloads or deterred anyone? Just ask your kid.

Don’t think deterrence here, think blowback.

Honestly, if Schmitt and Shanker’s claim is accurate, you should be shaking in your boots. And someone on Capitol Hill should be starting to ask some relevant questions, including this one: Could “computer specialists” in the employ of the Pentagon be responsible for your death in a future terrorist attack?